io9 is proud to current fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. As soon as a month, we characteristic a narrative from LIGHTSPEED’s present difficulty. This month’s choice is “The Final Lucid Day” by Dominique Dickey. Take pleasure in! (You too can hearken to the story here).
THE LAST LUCID DAY
by Dominique Dickey
You’re asleep in goals of your father holding your head underwater, so the decision from Magnolia Assisted Residing goes to voicemail.
“I didn’t elevate a son of mine to rely on his fingers,” your father says within the dream—as a result of ah, sure, it’s your entire worst moments rolled right into a single nightmare.
You hear the beeping of your alarm and you already know you’re dreaming, however you’ll be able to’t get up any greater than you’ll be able to pull your self freed from your father’s arms. He holds you down and tells you to rely the seconds, present him how lengthy you’ll be able to maintain your breath, however the one solution to make sense of the numbers is to tally them in your fingers. He pushes you down deeper. He walks away.
It all the time ends with him strolling away.
It all the time ends with you splashing within the deep finish, alone.
• • • •
If you awake, sweat outlines your physique within the mattress like a policeman’s chalk drawing. Your alarm has been going off for . . . how lengthy? Too lengthy. You’re operating late for work, and at present already feels terrible.
You name in sick. That’s sorted. What’s subsequent? The voicemail.
The voice of the message is automated. You knew this was coming, however there was no approach of realizing when. You work that’s the aim of the service—to inform you precisely when.
Properly, one other hour in mattress received’t damage. You need the sensation of waking up proper, from dream and even from no dream in any respect. You set your alarm once more and shut your eyes however you’ll be able to’t get again to sleep. You catch your self eager about your father’s favourite belt—thick black leather-based, buckle scratched to hell. You’re a grown man and it nonetheless makes you are feeling wobbly with concern.
You haul your self out of your sweat-damp mattress. You bathe. Magnolia Assisted Residing is an hour away in visitors. You cease at an ATM on the best way and get there simply earlier than eleven.
• • • •
You have been six when your mother and father known as it quits. Mother obtained Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthdays. They alternated Easters, a vacation neither of them particularly cared about. Dad obtained each different weekend. Each different Friday, you’d haul your in a single day bag to highschool and stash it behind the receptionist’s desk. Each different Friday, your father would present up within the pickup line in his purple sports activities automotive.
His bachelor condo was two hours out of town. On the midway level, he’d pull off the freeway and circle on the floor streets for a bit, finally pulling into the car parking zone of a mini-mart or a fuel station. You’d stretch your legs after which he’d hand you a few tens and set you unfastened on the aisles of junk meals. You’d eat collectively in silence.
That was while you felt closest to him. Not in his condo, an attractive place that by no means felt like house, however within the automotive in a nondescript car parking zone, surrounded by overpriced snacks, his espresso black and gritty as tar steaming within the cupholder between you.
• • • •
At Magnolia, the receptionist tells you your father is within the backyard. You decide by the bushes and rosebushes till you discover him sitting at a wrought iron desk with a composition ebook and a ballpoint pen, scribbling. There’s an extended second earlier than he seems to be up and sees you. You want time might cease, might provide you with area to consider the which means behind the phrases he’s writing—or perhaps they’re numbers, or diagrams.
No matter it’s, it is smart to somebody smarter than you. Somebody with the specialised data required to grasp it. Lucid, your father is a genius. He’s probably the most good man you already know.
After which he seems to be at you. There’s a flash of shock on his face earlier than he pushes himself to his ft and comes shut, his arms held out as if to hug you. “It’s a Thursday, isn’t it? What have I carried out to deserve this?”
You smile. Even now, he doesn’t know you nicely sufficient to know you’re forcing it. “I assumed we’d go for a drive.”
• • • •
Your father, a theoretical mathematician famend in his discipline, stood over your shoulder as you probably did your homework. You have been a baby. You have been counting in your fingers. He took off his belt and laid it on the desk. He wasn’t really going to beat you with it, however you didn’t know that—how might you presumably know that? It might take a couple of extra years of this earlier than you noticed straight to the underside of his empty threats.
He by no means hit you. The specter of violence saved you in line, and that was violent in a quiet kind of approach. Each different weekend you eclipsed your self. You sat on the kitchen desk together with his belt beside you and also you let your thoughts go elsewhere. You hid in plain sight. You spoke solely when spoken to, in non-answers and with a heavy tongue. No, he by no means hit you, however generally he took you by the shoulders and shook you, as if it might carry you again.
You discovered addition and subtraction by rote. You discovered to swim. You discovered to vanish. You discovered different issues, too, that you just have been glad to overlook.
If he had hit you with the belt, if he had made you rely the lashes, you wouldn’t have used your arms to search out the numbers.
• • • •
You drive for an hour, alternately speaking about nothing and buzzing alongside to clean jazz classics on the radio. You pull off the freeway, circle for a bit, discover a fuel station with an hooked up market. You give him two crisp twenty-dollar payments. Inflation, you suppose. That should cowl it.
You comply with him inside. He doesn’t look almost as outdated as he’s, and he wears his pleasure like slightly child. He has the money crushed in a single fist, the index finger of the opposite hand tapping his lips as he paces the aisles. The shop’s small, however he takes his selections severely, and also you let him.
After a couple of minutes of witnessing his indecision, you get lost to determine your individual haul. Potato chips. A bottle of ginger ale, weeping condensation. A styrofoam cup of black espresso that’s by some means burnt though it’s freshly regurgitated from the machine.
You’re on the register when he slides as much as you, impatient—by some means he’s already made his picks and bought them—and asks for the automotive keys. You hand them over. You watch by the window as he folds himself into the passenger seat of your sensible SUV and begins to eat. The pimply attendant takes your bank card, swipes it, and arms it again.
• • • •
You turned eighteen. You stopped answering his calls and, finally, he stopped calling. A part of you felt like he was giving up on you, however the larger a part of you felt relieved. You considered him everytime you went to a fuel station or mini-mart—on a regular basis, at first.
The recollections pale, as recollections are inclined to do, and also you considered him much less and fewer.
Twenty years handed. You hardly considered him in any respect. It was peaceable. It was good. You had the quiet form of happiness that’s rattling close to unimaginable to seize in phrases. You didn’t take into consideration him, you lived your life, and also you have been glad.
• • • •
He known as after your mother died. He had a brand new quantity, however so did you, and also you by no means requested how he obtained yours. He wished to return to the funeral, wished to know if it was okay with you, didn’t wish to simply present up and shock you. The thoughtfulness was sudden—it was simpler to see him as the person who would do the blatantly thoughtless factor.
“Positive,” you mentioned.
“I’ll see you there,” he mentioned.
The funeral was on a scorching day. He sat within the again and left as quickly because the service was over. You barely noticed him, however he seemed simply the identical as you remembered. You puzzled if he was sporting the identical belt: tarnished silver buckle, black leather-based gone limp with the years.
Two weeks after the funeral—you spent every week waffling, and one other week working up the nerve—you known as him. “Come over for espresso,” you mentioned. You couldn’t inform if the provide was for him or for you. You couldn’t inform what you hoped to realize, however you had little or no to lose. Your unimaginable, wordless happiness had already shattered. What might he do to you that had not already been carried out? What extra might he take?
He got here to your home on a Saturday afternoon. He was a well-known stranger. He hugged you tightly and got here away crying, embarrassing you each. His reminiscence had already gone fuzzy across the edges, the previous bleeding into the current, however he nonetheless knew you. He missed you. You have been proper on time.
• • • •
You sit within the automotive and also you eat. You don’t converse—you don’t even have a look at one another—however you are feeling near him.
Perhaps that is sufficient. Perhaps that is all you wanted.
• • • •
Two years after you bought your dad again—two years of awkward biweekly espresso visits, speaking round all of the stuff you wished to speak about—got here the fireplace.
He appeared to slide by time, complicated you with folks he used to know, forgetting how outdated you have been, forgetting which tales he’d already instructed you. He confirmed you proofs that made no sense, although you blamed your lack of mathematical data for this. He obtained misplaced across the nook from his home, as soon as, however his neighbors walked him house and he laughed when he recounted the incident to you.
He forgot he was cooking in the course of frying an egg. He left a burner on and wandered out of the room. He was at his desk puzzling over an equation, a hand-drawn diagram that solely he might perceive, when a kitchen towel caught fireplace. From there it unfold to the curtains. He would’ve been advantageous if he’d fled when the smoke alarm began to beep, however he tried to place the flames out himself.
You introduced him fuel station espresso while you visited him within the hospital. He had bandages round each his arms and he seemed like he’d aged ten years within the time it took you to reach.
“I’m not going to be cussed about this,” he mentioned. “I’m not going to do this to you—make you get a courtroom order or else make you watch me die the exhausting approach. I do know I shouldn’t reside alone anymore.”
Within the silence, you puzzled if he meant so that you can make him a proposal—you probably did have loads of area, in spite of everything, in your mother’s outdated home. However you didn’t provide, and he didn’t ask.
“I’ll ship you a hyperlink,” he mentioned. “I already picked out a spot. Magnolia Assisted Residing. Forty minutes out of town, specialised in reminiscence care. Simply . . . say you’ll come go to me.”
“I’ll come go to you,” you mentioned.
Awkward Saturday espresso had a brand new location. He wore lengthy sleeves to cowl the burn scars. He labored day and night time on theorems that you just started to see for the nonsense they have been. Time and recollections flowed round him like uneven water. He was adrift. He was drowning.
You couldn’t save him—you weren’t even certain if you happen to wished to—however you visited each week.
• • • •
“There’s this factor,” he instructed you, although by then you definitely’d already carried out your individual analysis. “A service they provide. An implant. It might probably inform you when your final good day—your final actually good day—will likely be. The catch is that if the affected person is aware of their time is up, then the white coats say it results in . . . detrimental remedy outcomes. It’s a double blind, I assume. The docs don’t even know. It’s higher if they simply notify the household.” He scratched his arm by his sleeve. You imagined the best way his burned pores and skin went puckered and skinny. “I gave them your quantity. I hope that’s all proper.”
There he was: the person who would do the blatantly thoughtless factor, tossing you right into a duty that you just by no means wished, didn’t know the right way to bear. Actuality closed over your head like chlorinated water.
“That’s advantageous with me,” you mentioned.
• • • •
On the backside of his bag of chips he licks the mud off his fingers, then seems to be at you for a very long time. “It’s my final day, isn’t it?”
You make a concerted effort to not tense up. “What do you imply?”
“Oh, come on. My final lucid day.”
You shrug. He doesn’t know you nicely sufficient to know your tells. “I assumed you didn’t join that.”
“Don’t give me that. They did all of the checks. All of the implants—even those which are nonetheless in trials. Complete.”
You shrug once more. “You certain you bear in mind your consumption that nicely?”
“Sure I bear in mind my fucking consumption—”
“Actually? As a result of generally you misremember stuff. It comes with the entire terrain.”
He doesn’t say something, however his expression is nuclear in its rage. The anger makes you are feeling small, makes you consider his belt on the kitchen desk within the condo you by no means felt protected in.
After which the anger goes away all of sudden, his face slack as he gropes within the footwell for one thing else to eat. There’s an unguarded second the place he seems to be damage, and he seems to be unhappy, and he seems to be very outdated.
The petty satisfaction you are feeling at having damage him is undercut solely by your individual guilt. You are feeling like a monster, such as you’re no higher than him. However what you need from him—it may’t be a deathbed confession. The dialog will lose its worth if he is aware of he’s out of time, if he’s solely saying the phrases as a result of it’s his final likelihood to take action. You want it to really feel natural. You want it to really feel actual.
You ask the query you could have all the time been afraid to ask: “If you look again at my childhood, do you ever remorse something?”
“No.” He solutions so shortly he can’t have presumably considered it.
“Actually?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Wow.”
“Does that shock you?”
“I simply suppose—”
“The best way I see it, I did my finest. I supplied. And I didn’t have a dad in any respect, so it’s not like I had a blueprint in
that regard. I did my finest.”
“However what about . . .” You’re making an attempt to consider a concrete instance, one which doesn’t damage an excessive amount of to speak about. “What about while you taught me to swim?”
“You discovered.”
“You could possibly have drowned me.”
“Eh,” he says.
You consider him tossing you into the water, him pinching your nostril and holding your head down so that you’d study to carry your breath, him strolling away and leaving you flailing within the deep finish. You may really feel the concern as if it’s occurring proper now. You may scent the chlorine and the sunscreen as if it’s in your pores and skin—reminiscence is unusual, that approach. Humorous that you just thought you may carry up this story with out feeling that acquainted sad ache in your chest, your intestine.
This is the reason you went so a few years with out pondering of him in any respect. That is what you have been avoiding. You don’t know what you need. You need him to confess he damage you. You wish to hear him say that he was unsuitable. You retain pushing.
“I might have died,” you inform him.
“You didn’t. You discovered to swim, didn’t you?”
“It’s not simply that. I used to be a child.”
“You turned out okay.”
“Did I?”
“You probably did,” he says, with excellent confidence, like he has no thought how unsuitable he’s.
He barely is aware of you—since you haven’t let him, as a result of there’s a lot you haven’t instructed him. He doesn’t know in regards to the path of wrecked relationships, all totally your fault, which you blame in your attachment points, which you blame on him. Your mom is the one relationship you couldn’t totally destroy, and
goddammit you tried. He doesn’t know in regards to the nightmares. Telling him how he’s ruined you’ll represent admitting defeat, however he can’t apologize for the ache if you happen to don’t present him the injuries.
You aren’t going to indicate him the injuries.
He’s by no means going to apologize.
Why did you even trouble? Why did you even hope? He’s going to overlook you and he won’t ever, ever be sorry.
Time is variety and reminiscence is merciless. Sometime you’ll overlook him too.
• • • •
You have been in school the primary time you misplaced your father.
“My mother’s an architect,” you mentioned, when the topic of household got here up in a dialog along with your freshman 12 months roommate.
“What about your dad?”
“I don’t have a dad,” you mentioned. You didn’t even hesitate, and also you felt no guilt for the smoothness of the lie. If something, it made you proud. Have a look at me, you thought. Have a look at the life I’m creating with out him. Have a look at how good that life could possibly be.
The grief got here later, while you replayed the dialog in your slim dorm mattress—a gradual blooming feeling behind your sternum, like blood spreading in water. You understand, now, that it was observe. You’ve already misplaced him as soon as. You understand how to lose him once more.
• • • •
It’s an hour again to Magnolia, and also you make the drive in silence. He’s not even offended, and perhaps you aren’t both. You suppose you’re principally unhappy.
He sips his shitty espresso. He activates the radio. Saxophone trickles out of the audio system.
“Again to the backyard?” you ask, when you’re parked in entrance of Magnolia. The climate’s nonetheless good, if a bit breezy. If he desires to spend his final good day engaged on proofs within the solar, you received’t stand in the best way of that.
“Yeah.” He will get his pocket book and ballpoint pen out of the backseat the place he stashed them. He leaves his trash within the footwell: metallic wrappers, an empty styrofoam cup. You inform the receptionist you’ve returned him for the day, then stroll him again to his little desk. He traces up his pocket book alongside its edge, then turns to you.
Ready.
Properly, what do you do?
You meet his gaze and maintain it. That is your dad. He’s your dad and he’s outdated, and he’s falling aside, and he’s going to die. And then you definitely’ll have a useless dad, who was a shithead in life and had the audacity to kick the bucket with out apologizing for any of his shitheadedness.
You miss not having a dad in any respect. You miss the years of simply denying his existence. The lie that felt increasingly true every time you instructed it. The story that you already know you’ll be able to by no means slip again into, now that it’s been fractured.
He won’t ever be himself once more. You hate him. You miss him already.
You hug him tightly and are available away crying, embarrassing the each of you.
In regards to the Writer
Dominique Dickey is a speculative fiction author and recreation designer. Because the artistic director of Sly Robotic Video games, they’ve created Plant Woman Recreation and Tomorrow on Revelation III. They contributed to the Nebula Award-winning Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and the ENNIE Award-winning Journeys By the Radiant Citadel. Their novella Redundancies & Potentials is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock in 2024. Their brief fiction has appeared in venues together with Fantasy Journal, Lightspeed Journal, and Nightmare Journal. They reside within the DC space, the place they’re all the time on the hunt for his or her subsequent thought. You’ll find their work at dominiquedickey.com.
Please go to LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared within the June 2024 difficulty, which additionally options work by Varsha Dinesh, Andrea Kriz, Megan Chee, Dominica Phetteplace, Deborah L. Davitt, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, Shanna Germain, and extra. You may look forward to this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should buy the entire difficulty proper now in handy e-book format for simply $3.99, or subscribe to the e-book version here.
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